Finding Your Voice with Aubrey Calaway

Today it's my pleasure to be speaking with Aubrey Calaway, who is the director of Foghorn, which is an audio collective and coworking space based in Portland. Nice to have you here today. Thanks so much for having me, Well, I'm excited to talk to you because obviously you and I have a lot of overlaps with our interest in audio and storytelling, and I know we met at the Portland Art Gallery because you happen to be there for an event around travel that we were working with one of our members of our community on. I guess let's start with audio. What's so special about the talking, the listening, the creation of this kind of space that made it possible for you to want to focus on this full time in your life? We could go back to the beginning of humanity, I feel like is where that story really begins. I mean, when you're talking about the power of audio storytelling, I think a lot of people trace it back to sitting around the fire oral tradition, or you can trace it back even to being in the womb and the fact that fetuses respond to the mother's voice and that that's one of the first points of contact as we have is with the vibration of a mother's voice. And so that's where the story of, I think the importance of audio writ large starts and why it, I think taps into something fundamental and has been around forever and will be around forever in different forms as technology changes. Of course, for me, I think the story also starts with my mom playing NPR and the car when we were driving around and me being in the backseat and my sister and I playing pretend NPR, we would have our own little NPR shows just in the backseat, kind of mimicking what we were hearing on the radio. And then I also grew up with, as podcasts were growing up as a medium, and when I was in high school, that was really when audio storytelling through this new streaming and on demand on our phone technology was also maturing. And so that's what brought me to Maine. I decided that I wanted to be an audio producer. I was interested in making podcasts, I was interested in radio, in audio storytelling and documentary. So I moved to Maine to attend the Salt Institute for documentary studies. I mean, there's so much about what you're saying that I really love and resonate with because it's knowing that you were kind of evolving as a person at the same time that the medium was evolving is really important. When I was coming up through, I think the first, so I've been doing podcasting, video and audio variations for 15 years, but when I first started talking about podcasting, people were like podcasting. They had just gotten used to the idea of blogging, which is, it's amazing to think that we've come so far in such a relatively short period of time and that you were there as this was happening. So how about early influences? I mean, NPR I also grew up listening to NPR and Nina Totenberg and Scott Simons and the great interviewers and their voices and sort of the larger stories and that it does have an influence as you're thinking about what you want to do with your life. But talk to me about some of those influences and who in particular did you feel like, I really want to be, maybe not like this person, but I can see myself going in this direction? You have to give props to Terry Gross and the amazing interviewers who've been holding down NPR for years. And I think those are influences, even if I don't, I'm not thinking about them on a daily basis just because they've shaped what radio is in American culture in such a significant way. And I think Ira Glass also has to be in there. I mean, this American life set the template in a very real way and was kind of the bridge from radio to podcasts in a big way. I think it lent prestige. They were innovating on the form at the same time that they were bringing in the kind of legacy of radio in American culture. And honestly, I think when I got to Salt and when a lot of the students that I then later taught as a teaching assistant at Salt arrive at the program, we're doing a lot of work to get them to not sound like Ira Glass because that's just been such a fundamental influence and has shaped the tone and the rhythm and the story structure of long form narrative casting that we're having to get people to stop unintentionally mimicking the way the cadence and inflection of eye glasses, very distinctive voice and style. And then I was also coming of age with more people who were bringing in more experimental forms into podcasts as the technology, as the servers and the software were becoming democratized and people could do it for cheaper. So shows welcome to Nightvale, which is still going. It's been around probably for 10 years, and it's an independent, actually fiction podcast set in a fictional desert town. It's kind of lovecraftian, it's kind of a horror kind of surrealist story. I don't listen to it anymore, but I was listening to it in high school, and that was revelatory at the time of like, okay, it doesn't have to just be interviews or even traditional narratives. We can be using audio, which is such a nimble medium to be telling all kinds of weird stories and wacky ways. Well, I am glad you brought up. Obviously that was one of my early, I dunno even obsessions because there really wasn't anybody else in the space. And then later on Krista Tippet came along and she did on being, which was a really different kind of podcast. But I also think it's fascinating to hear that you then had to help people unlearn because it's audio. So people, obviously there's a mimicry that happens that's maybe unintentional, maybe it's intentional, but with audio, it's especially strong. So I guess that's one of the areas that I want to go with first with you, which is how do you help somebody unlearn vocalizations or even a narrative approach? How do you do that as a teacher or even as somebody who is doing what you do now that's more production and more kind of help shaping and forming a structure. Finding your own voice is hard, I think, in a lot of realms of life, but especially in podcast production. And I think your point is really good that humans are very good mimics. And so I think first you have to teach the fundamentals of storytelling. And this American life is great for that because they've got it down pat. They know how to have a strong beginning, middle, and end. They know how to identify stories that translate in radio. They're great reporters and they also have a very famous kind of a kill your darlings philosophy there. I mean, half the stories that they produce never make it to air. And now as a producer, I've been on the other end of that. I haven't produced for this American life, but I know many people who have, and they're brutal over there. So they just have a really high quality that I think is worthy of mimicking in a lot of ways. But I think one of the tricks that I often had to pull out of my bag with students to get them to stop sounding like Ira Glass was, we often, most of the time for salt stories, you'll write out a script, you'll do a bunch of reporting, you'll record, you'll select the best tape that you've gathered and then you'll write around it. And writing for audio, as I'm sure is a very kind of specific form and very different than the type of writing that we learn in school and essay based writing. So we have students write things out, they're crafting their story, they're finding their narrative arc, their tension, all that. And then they start reading out what they've written and it's sounding stilted. It's awkward. You can tell they're reading and it's often sounding like the things that they've heard on the radio. And so after they've written out their stories and they've kind of found the core threads and the beats that they want to hit, I'll often encourage them to go into the studio to bring a friend or another producer who's in the course with them, sit down and have them just tell the story, not looking at what they've written, not looking at notes, just explain as if you are literally sitting in front of your friend telling them the story. I have them do this at multiple stages of the reporting process and the final narration step for production one, because I think it helps people identify what they're actually excited about. And I think, I'm sure people can relate to this outside of the specifics of audio storytelling of when you're having trouble finding a path in life and you sit down, you talk to a friend and you start listing out ideas, you can naturally, both I think you and the person you're telling it to can hear in your voice what you're reacting to. What are you most excited about? Our bodies are part of our voice, and when it gets too stuck up of my mouth is just a conduit from my brain to express ideas. Things can get kind of rigid and stilted. But when you return to the roots of audio and of sound and of stories as a social phenomenon, you can figure out what's interesting to you, which is easy to lose sight of when you're writing and you can figure out what the most natural way to tell it is to use slang, to have pauses and to be searching for words. I mean, all of that I think adds texture, even though it is not as maybe shiny and clean as some, especially novice producers are seeking to feel like they are polished and professional. But I think the kind of gritty, very human texture of just social speech is, and maybe this is just a point of taste for me, that's where I think audio storytelling really shines. I'm glad that you brought up the idea of finding one's voice, and I love, this is the context. It's literally finding one's voice As opposed to other contexts where you're finding your way in the world, let's just say. But in this case, you're really, you're actually connecting with something physical to find the voice that is more uniquely yours. So turning this back to you, I mean, we've heard your early influence if we're talking about your own narrative arc. So tell me about finding your own voice. And as somebody who has done both things, I've been a writer and a podcaster, an interviewer, an editor, and then I've had my own story. And sometimes I think you get really good at that first thing that you're bringing the story out of other people and you're putting that story into the world and sometimes it causes you not to focus on your own thing. So tell me about your experience with where you are now or where you've been when it comes to that. Yeah. As a producer, your first job usually is to get good at being a conduit for someone else's voice, at least when you're not the host, which has been, I have hosted some of the work that I've done, but most of what you're getting paid to do is working with at this point. A lot of celebrity guests, hosts, or bigger names, journalists, they're the face. You are behind the scenes, you're learning how to write in their voice, which is a great and marketable skillset to have. But finding my own voice is a great question. I mean, for me, there's a strong personal element of I've been transitioning over the last few years, and so my voice has physically changed. My vocal chords have physically thickened as I've been on hormone therapy. And so I listened back to the narration that I did a few years ago, and it's a different person. I've played it for other people and they haven't believed that it was actually me. And so I think I've been finding literally my own voice in that way, which has been really special as an audio producer. And also finding what exactly I am interested, what kinds of stories I'm actually interested in telling. And that's been a pretty long journey. I started out doing a lot of environmental focused journalism and reporting, which is something that I'm passionate about. So that was the entry point into my podcasting career. And then most recently, I was a producer on a show called the TransLash Podcast with Imara Jones, which is a trans focused culture, politics, trans rights interview show. And that's obviously another area of interest of mine, and that was great. But I think through all these experiences, I've realized not really interested in making podcasts for nonprofits. It's great that they're doing it. I'm not really interested in trying to hone policy through communications. And then I go to TransLash, I realize I'm not really even quite a journalist. That's not it either. And recently I've been kind of returning to my roots. The reason that I got into audio, I think fundamentally the reason I came to Salt and came to Maine was documentary. It's the practice of documenting its non-fiction storytelling. And so I've been developing a new project that will actually focus on trans documentary. And so I'm developing that idea right now and hoping to create some kind of physical center for focusing on that. It's an important point that sometimes the way that you find something is by figuring out what you need to leave behind. And sometimes that is hard because there's a reason they call it Kill your Darlings. I mean, there are things in our lives that we do because we're good at them, and other people will tell you, oh, you're really good at this, Aubrey. And then you think, well, I'm good at it, but it just isn't the thing exactly. And so as you're describing, well, that was good, but it's not the thing that was good, but it's not the thing. And there is something elemental about getting back to the thing. It also requires a certain amount of faith in your own ability to understand what your thing is and talk about voices. There's a lot of voices coming at us all the time from lots of different places that are going to tell us what our thing is or isn't. How do you make sure that you stay focused on what it is that You want to be exploring yourself? I mean, all of that is really true. And I think it's especially tough. The podcast industry is not in a good place right now, writ large. There was a bit of a, I kind of compare it to a .com bubble burst. There was, I think 10 years ago, kind of a huge influx of cash and interest in what this new medium could do for brands and businesses. And now that's kind of leveled off as people have realized that it's not actually that easy to make money off of podcasts. And so the industries have been in a tough place for the last few years. A lot of really talented producers have been losing jobs. A lot of really important and impressive production outfits have been folding. And now everything that we see with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting radio is now at risk as well. So there's been a pretty intense kind of sense of scarcity in the industry and certainly in myself as well of I can't turn down work right now because there's so little of it. So I'll take anything that I'm getting paid for and people tell me I'm good at it, and it feels good to be paid for doing something that you're good at. But it's really only been in the last few months where I've been kind of stepping back from that and saying, alright, it's great to get paid. It's great to be good at things, but if it's not feeling right in your body, it's not feeding your life, then that's not what I need to be doing. And just kind of recognizing that their trade off, I mean, life is trade-offs. There's not going to be one perfect career, one perfect job. It's about if I'm doing this, that means I can't be doing that. And sometimes it's worth it to say, no, I don't want to be doing that. I want to keep doing a thing that is paying my bills and all of that. But right now, I'm at least feeling in kind of a more risk tolerant, brave place. And honestly, I think just the chaos of the world for a time, our political moment was encouraging me to stick to what I knew to ground myself in the supposedly dependable and consistent. And something has switched in the last few months where I've just realized that consistently consistency, dependability are fundamentally illusions. A job that's paying good today may not be around tomorrow. And I think the decline of the podcast industry is a testament to that. Our political situation is a testament to that. So I'm interested in taking risks, and I think that's actually the exciting part of the decline of the heavy hitters. Big players in the podcast industry, like Spotify, closing down several of their outfits, audible and even the crumbling of Corporation for Public Broadcast. Alright, so the big institutions that we thought were kind of the places that we could go to that would always be funded, that would be always doing work, those aren't around anymore. So let's just make what we want to make. And when there's not really much money to be made, it kind of, I think brings back the artistic sensibility, the risk taking that made this such an interesting medium to begin with. So I'm throwing caution to the wind, I think right now. And I can do that because I've been in the industry for a while and I feel confident in my skills. And also honestly, because Portland is an amazing place to be an audio producer because we have so many amazing producers here. We gather in space. I help run Foghorn. We can talk more about that. I think if I was just floating alone in the ether, it would be a lot harder. But having kind of all these producers around me feeling the same way, talking the same way is an emboldening experience. Well, I think that is a great next thing to talk about, which is Foghorn. And I wanted to offer also in reflection, just in the career that I've had in podcasting, and we started largely, I started radio and audio podcasting, not video podcasting. So it was entirely about the sound. And I still to this day remember some of the earliest pieces of advice that my audio producer shared with me, and they were absolutely invaluable. It's like working with a good editor to kind of hone your message. And so I also agree that working alongside other people who all have a passion for that particular medium, I think is incredibly important. But I do think before I started doing this, it would've been easy to be like, oh, well, what dot, you just show up. There's a microphone. You talk, what's the big deal? So I just want to give huge props to the people who are audio producers because I mean, I think the ones I've worked with over the years, including the current one that I work with, who happens to be my husband, who is entirely self-taught, may have only made me better. And you can't do these things for yourself as well as you do them with other people. So if anybody's asking if anybody cares, that's my deep respect for the people that you are working alongside in the collective. But now I'd like to hear your, now that I've given you my props, tell me your experience. I think it's a really important thing you're bringing up. Yeah. Well, I always say that I think Portland is the best place to be an audio producer in the country, maybe even the world. But I think I have a theory that we have the highest per capita audio producer rate in the country. I don't have any statistics to back that up. I think Brooklyn could maybe give us a run for our money. But we have so many people here, mostly because of the Salt Institute for documentary studies, which I've referenced. It's a graduate certificate program that's now run out of Maine College of Art and Design, although it's been around for 50 years. It started as a literary magazine at a high school Downeast and has had this amazing arc of transformation over the years and is now this one semester certificate program. Basically an amazingly intensive program where you learn everything you need to know to be an audio producer. They also have a film track that runs alongside it, and it's really well known in the industry, really well regarded, and it happens to be in Portland, Maine. And so when I moved here, I was just looking to have improve my skills and also improve my resume. I had heard from people all around the industry that this was the place to go if you really wanted to level up in your career. So I came being like, what a random place, Portland, Maine. I'd been to it once, and I was like, it's a very sweet town. It's kind of on the edge of things. I'm not sure really what's going on there other than lighthouses and all of that. And then I came and was immediately just like, oh, wow. There is a rich community of audio storytellers who love being here, who love mainly art. They don't just happen to be in Portland because they want a job because there really aren't many audio jobs located here In the same way you would move to Brooklyn or move to Chicago to work in the industry, people move here often for Salt. They fall in love with Maine often through the process of reporting on it for their salt projects and then stay. And that's what happened to me. That's what has happened to probably 10 plus people in my community here. So once I decided to stay in Maine and I was doing all these remote jobs and struggling with the kind of disembodied nature of that work, a few of my friends came together who were also audio producers and decided we need a physical space to gather. We're all doing remote work, but we don't want to be doing it at our kitchen table alone. And so they found a little office on Congress Street and just set up a very casual, totally unofficial coworking space where we were all just chipping in a little bit of money every month to have a place to go to do our work and to talk and to talk shop. And that was about three years ago. And since then, we've moved into new office space, a much nicer office space in the State Theater building. We maintain about 18 members at a time. And that's not even all of the audio producers in Portland. It's a fraction of it. And so we're a coworking space. We have people coming in doing their work every day. We also host events. We do documentary screenings, we do skill shares, we do creative projects together. And we host some famously good office parties as well, because audio producers are just fun too. They're fun people because they're very social people. They're thoughtful, but extremely interested in other people. So you go to a party filled with audio producers and you'll be asked the best questions that you've ever experienced at any social event, and people will be listening to the answers. So I adore my audio community and getting to be the director of this physical place, bringing these people together is just such an amazing delight. And we're constantly being fed new blood through Salt every semester, bringing new students, new producers in. So it's really an incredibly vibrant community. So we've talked about the beginning and the middle, and obviously hopefully the end of your narrative arc is way, way out. But let's assume that most of us in our lives have multiple narrative arcs because we live, most of us live enough years. So what do you see the end point as of right now? Or I guess, what do you hear in your mind as you're developing your voice and you're developing what you want to do, what do you want that to look like for yourself? Big question. I think I have pulled some kind of threads of core truth from a lot of the different professional experiences I've had over the past few years in my audio career. One being what I've learned from Foghorn really is the importance of gathering in physical space. I think in a lot of ways, sometimes audio is a means to an end of just connecting of just the basic human desire to listen, to be listened, to be in deep conversation, to understand someone else's experience, to be told stories to tell. Stories and podcast apps and YouTube and streaming are all kind of amazing tools to be able to do that. But I know, and I think a lot of people are feeling a bit disenchanted with digital experience right now. It serves a purpose and will of course continue to serve a purpose. But I'm most interested in gathering people in physical space together and listening together and talking together, warm body to warm body. And so I'm hoping to do, I think that's core, I think. And then in the mission-driven work, I think is there too. And I think right now, I'm especially compelled by the mission of understanding, representing, defending trans life and trans culture. We're at a extremely dangerous moment for trans people right now, the most dangerous I think we've ever been in. And it's also a moment where stories are being negotiated in a very public way around what it means to be trans, what trans-ness is, and what place it should hold in our culture right now. Obviously, the right has a very specific story that is fear motivated and also very much a means to an end for them. Politically, trans people are the scapegoat du jour, and the far right are very good at crafting narratives that spread well through digital media. And so I'm really interested in how can I use the skills that I have, the storytelling that I have, and the powerful act of gathering and physical space of actually saying, we've had enough of the digital culture wars. It's much harder to demonize people in physical space. So I'm interested in bridging these two things or three things really gathering in physical space, storytelling and the fight for trans lives and liberty. Those are big. So I guess it gives you lots to continue to work on for yourself. And I want to double down on what you said, that this idea of when you have a human who is in front of you who are next to you, the ability to demonize them as a concept, it is hard to uphold because they're a human. And I think I've learned this through years of really being a family doctor where I show up with patients of all different, comes from all different backgrounds. And so it's one thing to have somebody in a digital form be like, oh, I'm going to represent this person this way. But I think you're right. I think if you can share people in their own voice and shared narratives in a way that supports people understanding the shared humanity, that's going to be very powerful. So I'm looking forward to seeing what you bring forward. I think it's really wonderful. I give you a lot of, I'm going to send lots of positive energy your way. Thank you. It's appreciated. Anything else that you think it would be helpful for people to know about you or about audio production or about your view of the world? No, but I would just say keep tabs on what Salt is doing, on what Foghorn is doing. I've been describing it as a pretty kind of maybe insular sounding culture. We do a lot to support each other, but fundamentally, this is about sharing stories, worries in Maine with Maine. And so SALT is often hosting really great public facing events. Foghorn is hoping to do more of that. So tap into think credible kind of audio storytelling work that's being done here, not just for producers, it's for everyone. Well, Aubrey, I appreciate your being willing to come in and share at least some part of the story of you and of the work that you're doing. And I really appreciate the work itself that you've been doing this number of years. So thank you. Thank you so much. Today I've been speaking with Aubrey Calaway, who is the director of Foghorn, which is an audio collective and coworking space based in Portland, Maine. He's also an audio producer and is a community leader and so many more things. So I really look forward to people who are hearing this or seeing this. Who would like to communicate with Aubrey. And what's the best way, Aubrey for people to find you? I'm really doing a digital detox right now, so they can email me aubrey calaway@gmail.com, and they can also look up Foghorn on Instagram at Foghorn Very good. All right. Well, I would also hope that Aubrey will come and join us at one of our future Portland Art Gallery. So we'll maybe you'll be there and hopefully people who are listening will find some way to get in touch with you. Absolutely. Alright, thanks Thank you.